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Malicious messages such as scams and phishing attempts are some of the most dangerous items that you can receive in your email inbox. These messages often attempt to create a sense of urgency with the hope that you will click a link and give up a password or other sensitive information. Other messages contain attachments designed to infect your computer with viruses. Learning how to identify dangerous email can help you prevent it from causing damage to your computer, your finances and your privacy.

Beware of any message asking you to provide personal information such as a password for an online service. These messages are almost always phishing attempts designed to steal passwords from the unsuspecting. Often, these messages attempt to prey on your fears by warning you that an account will be blocked or canceled if you do not sign in.

Step 3

Avoid clicking links, unless you are expecting a message with a confirmation link because you have signed up for a new online account. Otherwise, links typically lead to phishing websites. If you believe a message with a link might be legitimate, type the address of the website manually to be certain you are navigating to the correct website.

Step 4

Avoid any message promising large sums of money in exchange for providing a trivial service. Such messages are typically scams, sent to thousands of people at a time using automated systems with the hope that one or two will respond.

Step 5

Avoid any message with an attachment, even if the message appears legitimate. Attachments frequently contain viruses.

Step 6

View the source code of a message if you believe the sender’s address is forged. The source code contains the full headers of the message including the address of the originating server. If the originating server has a different address than the one in the “From” field, the sender’s address may be forged.

Tip

If you receive email containing a scam or phishing attempt, you can report it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation via the Internet Crime Complaint Center. If you receive spam, forward it to the Federal Trade Commission at spam@uce.gov for investigation.

If you’ve ever opened your email application to see that you have hundreds of new messages in just a day or two, you know what it is like to be hit by email spam. Spam isn’t just a big waste of space in your email account. It is annoying to wade through all those emails. Even more importantly, the sheer volume of viagra, porn, I’m the King of Siam’s uncle and need you to move money for me, etc. emails makes missing an important email from an actual customer or the boss a lot more likely. If you happen to work for someone who isn’t technologically savvy, you could even get in trouble for getting spam mail. Your boss may be under the impression that you had to visit 50 porn sites and sign up for their email lists to get all of this junk mail in your inbox. Stop the bombardment of spam mail before the little “you’ve got mail” tune going off every three seconds drives you to resort to pen and paper for your business correspondance or ruins your boss’s opinion of your work ethic. Get some anti spam software.

For the few people who never fill out online forms, don’t let friends or family know their email address and rarely send or receive email, this may sound downright silly. However, anyone who has had to deal with spam knows that a grown man may be tempted to break down and cry after wading through 200 emails that sound like they might be important, only to find that he is being encouraged to buy shares of some odd stock or see some movie star’s compromising photos. As you think about this rather depressing cycle of spam deletion, you are probably starting to wonder if there is any hope or if you should just try to cram your computer down the garbage disposal. Luckily, there is help for people who are overwhelmed by spam mail – anti spam software.

Of course, you won’t be able to find anti spam software that is perfect. Despite your best efforts, there will be some mail trickling in that you don’t want to see because spammers spend every waking minute trying to figure out new ways to ruin your productivity and sneak past the barriers. They hack into email accounts, send email from fake email addresses using reputable domain names, send emails that look like actual articles with the spammy word hyphenated, misspelled, or disguised in some other way in the body of the text, or come up with some other new solution to circumvent that sanity saving anti spam software.

However, without anti spam software, you are wide open to attack from spammers. It is well worth the money to buy a good anti spam software to free up a bit of time. After all, you have anti-virus, spyware and firewall software on your computer, right? (The correct answer is yes. Otherwise spammers are soon going to be the least of your problems as your computers are hacked and infected right and left.) Spam is here to stay and who wants to spend an hour or two a day fighting it? If you think an hour or two a day isn’t that big a deal, think about how many years you plan to read email each day and multiply that by 365. How many hours of your life will you be throwing away on spam because you didn’t invest in anti spam software? In 10 years, you could have recovered a mindboggling 3,650 hours. Imagine what amazing new skill you could have developed if you used that time to learn a hobby.

If you are still on the fence, think about this – what else gives you a time savings of at least 75% on a task for under $40? Don’t forget the number of hours you are regaining. Multiply them by your hourly pay rate and you are also looking at an incredible financial return on the investment in anti spam software.

About the Author:
Wouldn’t you love to know how to stop unwanted spam e-mail? It’s not as hard as you might think and there are some simple steps you can take to reduce or eliminate the amount of spam you get every day. Article source: www.cpusecurity.com

If YOU have ever felt angry about these annoying pests and wanted to do something about it but didn’t know how, read on! The following is a list of what NOT to do when you receive spam.

Do NOT try to follow remove instructions! In most cases, one of two things will happen. (1) You will have affirmed that your e-mail address is valid, and therefore will receive even MORE spam, or (2) You will receive a follow-up e-mail from the appropriate Postmaster that the e-mail address you replied to is invalid.

Do NOT flame, mail-bomb, or otherwise use terrorist tactics to get back at the spammer. In a rock fight, both parties end up with bloody heads. Not only will you leave yourself open for retribution (in some cases this means legal recourse), but you will have discredited the efforts of other anti-spammers by bringing the Anti-Spam Campaign down to the same level as the irresponsible spammers themselves. Besides, most of the e-mail addresses that spammers use are not valid and your efforts will be wasted.

To help rid the internet of this annoying, unwanted waste, do the following:

Contact your internet service provider and inquire about their Acceptable Use Policies on spamming and what they are doing to block the transmission of spam to you.

Report all spammers to the appropriate authorities. The easiest way to do this is to register with Network Abuse Clearinghouse (abuse.Net) and let them do the legwork for you. Many spammers forge their e-mail addresses and headers, making tracking them down time-consuming and frustrating.

Strengthening ISP policies and reporting spammers will certainly help, but the only way to PERMANENTLY stop spam is to contact your Representatives and urge support of opt-in anti-spam legislation.

If you regularly or even occasionally use the internet, chances are you’ve come across an annoying and malicious set of programs affectionately referred to by computer users as ‘spyware’. Like ‘adware’, spyware programs track your internet usage, collect personal information, spawn ‘pop-up’ advertisements, and can even alter your internet browser settings. Spyware generally refers the kinds of adware that are covertly installed onto your computer without your consent.

Many spyware programs will cause your computer to slow down in its performance, and may even cause lock-ups and crashes. For this reason I highly recommend using a spyware remover on a regular basis to help keep your computer working at it’s best. There are a number of spyware removers available today, and the two I most highly recommend are ‘Spybot – Search and Destroy’, made by Patrick Kolla, and ‘Ad-Aware SE’ produced by Lavasoft. Both of these programs are available in a basic form free of charge. More advanced forms of the programs are available for a small fee, however I have personally been more than happy with just the free versions.

In more recent times, Microsoft has jumped into the spyware remover business and has released a free update for Windows XP, Windows 2003, and Windows 2000 called the ‘Windows AntiSpyware Beta’. Like all beta programs, it is in its testing stage, but is intended to be released as a free product for Window’s users sometime in the near future. One major benefit of the Microsoft spyware remover is it is often able to detect and halt spyware as it is being installed, whereas most other spyware removers are normally only able to catch spyware after it is already on your computer.

Be wary when looking for a good spyware remover. There are many advertisements today for spyware removers that are misleading, and there are some phony programs that actually install spyware of their own if you use them! For this reason, its unadvisable to use any spyware remover that you see advertised in a ‘pop-up’ add, or other flashy and obnoxious advertisement, as these are often the programs to be wary of. Before using a spyware remover, do some research on it online, there are many online communities and forums that discuss which spyware removers are good and which ones are potentially harmful.

No single spyware remover is perfect; you may find better success with some over others. A good overall strategy is run more than one program to increase your chances of keeping spyware free. I run both Spybot and Ad-Aware at least once a week, and install updates for these programs whenever they are available.

About the Author:
Muna wa Wanjiru is a Web Administrator and has been researching and reporting on Internet for years. To Post Your Comments on spyware remover, visit his blog.

Spam is here to stay. And whether you like it or not, you have to face spam squarely and do your share in mitigating its negative effects. Although spam can be a source of information, spam is taken negatively because it is unsolicited. Who would ever want to receive bulk of emails containing product advertisements and easy get-rich-schemes information? Spam can slow down your server’s bandwidth and can be a form of spy ware designed to steal confidential information from your computer.

One way to deal with spam or unsolicited emails is thru email filters or email filtering spam. Basically email filtering is a process which acts as a shield to inbound and even existing emails. Your emails should be screened out not only to unclog your email box and your mail server from spam but also to address possible threats of viruses and even spyware that may encroach into your computer and later hamper your productivity.

Email filtering spam can be classified into integrated, stand alone and online. All of these email filtering spam categories share one common objective geared towards ridding out spam and even viruses. They only differ on how email filtering process is employed and undertaken.

Email filtering spam under the integrated category is the most common among the three categories. Such email filtering spam integrates email filter as a feature of your existing email software. With this feature, you can mark emails as spam or not spam or you can bounce the email back to sender. Most integrated email filtering spam tools automatically segregate and place suspected spam into a folder for deletion or retention. Examples of integrated email filters are Spambully and Spam Inspector.

The stand alone email filtering spam is not a common email filter. However, it is as useful as the rest of commonly used email filtering spam. This is in the form of a separate application installed on your PC. One major advantage of using this email filtering spam is that it checks emails on the mail server before they are downloaded. The only drawback is that it requires technical configuration which may not be an easy task for a non technical user. One popular example of standalone email filter is MailwasherPro.

The third email filtering spam category is called online. Online spam filters are two types. One type is for commercial use while the second type is for home use. For the business type, this online email filtering spam directly deletes spam from the mail server without even reaching the recipients. On the other hand for the home use type, emails sent require authentication from the sender. Authentication failure means non acceptance of inbound email to user’s inbox. Typical examples of business type and home use type are iHate and Spam Arrest respectively.

The email filtering spam tools presented above are available options in addressing spam. Still the effectiveness of any of the email spam filters above lies on how you optimally use these tools. Joining e-groups and forums on email filtering spam could provide you invaluable information and help you deal with spam better.